Petrarch had always a great predilection for travelling: the paucity of books rendered this a mode,--in his eyes, almost the only mode,--for the attainment of the knowledge for which his nature craved. The first journey he made after his return from Bologna, was to accompany Giacomo Colonna on his visit to the diocese of Lombes, of which he had lately been installed bishop. Lombes is a small town of Languedoc, not far from Thoulouse; it had been erected into a bishopric by pope John XXII., who conferred it on Giacomo Colonna, in recompence of an act of intrepid daring successfully achieved in his behalf. [Sidenote: 1330. Ætat. 26.] It was the summer season, and the travellers proceeded through the most picturesque part of France, among the Pyrenees, to the banks of the Garonne. Besides Petrarch, the bishop was accompanied by Lello, the son of Pietro Stefani, a Roman gentleman; and a Frenchman named Louis. The friendship that Petrarch formed with both, on this occasion, continued to the end of their lives: many of his familiar letters are addressed to them under the appellations of Lælius and Socrates; for Petrarch's contempt of his own age gave him that tinge of pedantry which caused him to confer on his favourites the names of the ancients. Lello was a man of education and learning; he had long lived under the protection of the Colonna family, by the members of which he was treated as a son or brother. The transalpine birth of Louis made Petrarch call him a barbarian; but he found him cultivated and refined, endowed with a lively imagination, a gay temper, and addicted to music and poetry. In the society of these men, Petrarch passed a divine summer; it was one of those periods in his life, towards which his thoughts frequently turned in after-times with yearning and regret.[35] On his return from Lombes, Petrarch became an inmate in the house of cardinal Colonna. He had leisure to indulge in his taste for literature: he was unwearied in the labour of discovering, collating, and copying ancient manuscripts. To him we owe the preservation of many Latin authors, which, buried in the dust of monastic libraries, and endangered by the ignorance of their monkish possessors, had been wholly lost to the world, but for the enthusiasm and industry of a few learned men, among whom Petrarch ranks pre-eminent. He thought no toil burthensome, however arduous, which drew from oblivion these monuments of former wisdom. Often he would not trust to the carelessness of copyists, but transcribed these works with his own hand. His library was lost to the world, after his death, through the culpable negligence of the republic of Venice, to which he had given it; but there still exists, in the Laurentian library of Florence, the orations of Cicero, and his letters to Atticus in Petrarch's handwriting.